IanSchafer.com

iMedia Connection on Me on Deep Focus on Social Media.

Take a moment to read an interview I did with iMedia Connection on Deep Focus, social media, innovation, and killer creative.

Here's a brief excerpt:

Harris: Building a community of fans is an important step for these entertainment campaigns, and is gaining ground in other business sectors. It's a natural fit to leverage existing communities that support a particular brand, but what suggestions do you have for starting from scratch?

Schafer: When building a community from scratch, perhaps the most important thing you can do involves asking "why." For example, you should be able to answer the basic question of "why are you building this community in the first place?" You should have a clear understanding of the goals you aim to achieve by connecting to your consumers -- and connecting them to each other. These could very well be different than your typical business goals. Rather, they may be goals that don't result directly in attributable sales but, rather, in the alignment of a brand with, and focus of a community on, a particular cause or lifestyle inherent to the brand.

The other "why" question that should be asked is "why would I join this community?" What does the consumer stand to gain by being an active (or even a passive) member of this community? What appropriate incentives exist for participants? You can prepare for this question by doing the appropriate market research before embarking on a social media "hunch."

From a technology and strategy perspective, it is also important to embark upon a discovery process to identify your development and distribution partners, who may very well be one in the same. Should you roll-your-own social network? Should you build on a modular platform? Should you build a community within an already existing social networking property? An understanding of your goals, your consumers and their behaviors and of your brand's personality will make finding the answers to these questions an easier task.

Read the whole shabang by clicking here.

Twitter This: Me @ OMMA Social on Monday, June 23rd.

I'll be performing live at OMMA Social at 4:15pm on Monday, June 23rd at the Yale Club (getting back at them for not accepting my application), speaking on a panel devoted to social media metrics.

I've sat on the sidelines for this discussion way too long. Seen too many panels on social media metrics that didn't address them at all. I'm hoping to do all I can to change that with this panel.

Here are the lascivious details:

4:15pm: Valuable by Any Measure: Metrics that Mean Something in Social Media

A soft drink advertiser boasts about the brand’s thousands of Facebook fans; a car advertiser is thrilled that its new car model is the talk of the blogosphere. Certainly this interest in their brands is better than the alternative, but what does it all mean? The search for metrics that mean something in social media.


Moderator: Jodi McDermott, Director of Product Management for Widgets, Clearspring Technologies

Heidi Browning, SVP, Client Solutions, MySpace

Blake Cahill, SVP Marketing, Visible Technologies

Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus

Adam Weinroth, Director of Product Marketing, Pluck Corp

Stephanie Pike, Strategic Program Manager for Digital Marketing, Circuitcity.com

Be there, and be part of the solution.

And take the discussion to Twitter, people.

Thoughts on Twitter/FriendFeed/Plurk/Etc. Business Models.

I trust that Ev & Biz are well on their way towards taking Twitter to an even higher level. And I'm sure they don't need my help in getting it there.

But I was just thinking about this last night, and figured I'd just put it out there.

What if Twitter, or any other messaging service, remained free for personal use, but charged for professional use? And by professional use, I mean customer service, messaging, product or news updates, or anything else.

What if in order for a company to use Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, FriendFeed, for any of the above purposes, they needed to pay a monthly access fee?

That fee would include:

** Unlimited messgaing (of course).


** More robust and customizable profile pages.


** A dashboard to manage followers and those the company follows.


** A tweet trend tracker that does an enterprise-level job of identifying, well, trends.


** An analysis tool that can call attention to customer service-related issues (flagging them as more urgent).


** A database that facilitates CRM with followers.


** Tech support for plugging its API into its already-existing CRM and marketing initiatives (for example, I'd love to get my Amex updates like 'payment due' via direct messages on Twitter).

I'm sure there are a whole bunch of ways to bring benefits to using these messaging services worth paying for -- especially for corporations searching for a bit of humanity in dealing with their consumers.

Charging individual power users is interesting, but you really don't want to dissuade them from becoming power users. Power users are integral for making these services get bigger.

Obviously, the only way this would work is if the service had some sort of critical mass, or at least one amongst consumers that these companies would find 'influential'.

But again, this is all just food for thought...do you have any?

Watch My Full Appearance @ IAB Leadership Forum on Online Video.

Watch me talk about the upfronts, the future of online video, branded entertainment, and oompa loompas from my appearance earlier this month at the IAB's Leadership Forum on Online Video, moderated by my good friend (even though he's a Phillies Fan) Patrick Keane from CBS. Also featured is Steve Robinson from Panache.

Let me know what you think:

New Post @ AdAge: When Habits Change Faster Than Ad Models.

My latest advisory, yet still optimistic tale contribution to Advertising Age's Digital Next is live. Hopefully it will be in the next print issue as well.

Here's a sneak preview:

When Habits Change Faster Than Ad Models Venture capital and big-media acquisitions can't bankroll social media forever

Posted on 05.02.08 @ 09:32 AM

Ian Schafer Ian Schafer also blogs at IanSchafer.com.
Technology is a funny thing. It enables humans to be capable of so much. It raises our potential to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

But so much of technology is hidden from plain view because it doesn't make money. Financial gain is arguably the most important aspect of technological innovation, because without it, all but the most altruistic of reasons cease to exist.

We are living in a time in which the media we consume are undergoing the most rapid technological transformation since the advent of TV. Back then, there was a lot for companies to gain by having a TV in every home in America. It gave advertisers the ability to pitch their wares to TV's captive audience. And over the years, those advertisers have shelled out billions upon billions of dollars continuing to do so because it was perhaps the best-performing media, but one that delivered a passive audience.

We are now witnessing a migration of ad dollars from lesser-performing media to online's active audience.

Even within a rapidly growing medium such as the web, there is a still more-quickly growing form of online media that we call social media. This includes social networks, blogs, virtual worlds, widgets, applications, communities and any other format where the individuals who use it create or distribute the majority of the content.

Read the rest over at AdAge.com by clicking here.

Recap of My Panel @ Content Delivery Economics.

Today I spoke on a panel @ Contentinople's Content Delivery Economics on the topic of Monetizing Content Through Digital Syndication & Advertising. My fellow panelists were:

Moderator: Mark Kapczynski, VP of In-Stream, EyeWonder

Scott Bender, VP Advertising Sales, IGN Entertainment Consumer Group, Fox Interactive Media

Brian Wieser, SVP, Director of Industry Analysis, Magna Global, Interpublic

Patrick Mahoney, Senior VP Digital Media, Entertainment Studios

Ian Schafer, CEO & Founder, Deep Focus

Julian Zilberbrand, VP Group Director, Technology & Ad Operations, MediaVest Worldwide

Travis Howe, Senior Vice President, Digital Sales, Sony Pictures

This was a lively panel filled with discussion about the future of content monetization. Key takeaways?

* Convergence is closer than it's ever been technologically, but is suffering from a bit of 'Who Killed the Electric Car' artificial growth-stunting.

* The model for the monetization of video content will ultimately be some combination of ad-supported and subscription revenue.

* There's no 'right way' to buy online video. For some advertisers, it's all about breadth and scale. For others, it's all about depth and experience.

* Advertising networks may very well represent the best shot at the potential for online video content to match up against TV in terms of reach.

* Brand integration doesn't scale well, but it's what lots of advertisers are looking for, especially when working with the large media companies.

* The monetization of content is actually quite dependent upon the hardware and platforms it will be delivered to.

No big surprises here, but no one professes to have all the answers. But I suggest we get a heck of a lot closer before we start wondering about 'what's next'.

See Me At Content Delivery Econmics in NYC On April 22nd.

On April 22nd, I'll be speaking at the Content Delivery Economics conference at The Westin Times Square here in NYC.

Here's the info:

3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. Media Roundtable: Monetizing Content Through Digital Syndication & Advertising

New business models are emerging for the syndication of content through a variety of online digital distribution services. This panel, made up exclusively of media and advertising experts, will explore different options and the routes to monetizing your digital content through advertising solutions.

Moderator: Mark Kapczynski, VP of In-Stream, EyeWonder

Scott Bender, VP Advertising Sales, IGN Entertainment Consumer Group, Fox Interactive Media

Brian Wieser, SVP, Director of Industry Analysis, Magna Global, Interpublic

Patrick Mahoney, Senior VP Digital Media, Entertainment Studios

Ian Schafer, CEO & Founder, Deep Focus

Julian Zilberbrand, VP Group Director, Technology & Ad Operations, MediaVest Worldwide

Travis Howe, Senior Vice President, Digital Sales, Sony Pictures

Check out the full conference program here. If you're at all involved with the monetization of video content, this conference -- and panel -- is for you.

When ‘ Open ’ Isn ’ t Really ‘ Open ’ . The Battle to Own Your Code — And Your Creativity.

Oxford University Professor Jonathan Zittrain in his new book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, according to NetworkWorld, states that:

...today’s Internet appliances such as the iPhone and Xbox hamper innovation. That’s because these locked-down devices prohibit the kind of tinkering by end users that made PCs and the Internet such a force of economic, political and artistic change.

Zittrain argues that if the cybersecurity situation doesn’t improve, we will migrate to a different kind of Internet. The new Internet will have as its endpoints tethered appliances such as iPhones, which are controlled by their manufacturers, instead of open, changeable PCs attached to an open network that can foster the next round of disruptive innovation.

A bold statement. And he's got a point.

Now these devices are innovations unto themselves, and some even are positioned as development platforms. Take the iPhone, for example. Apple just released the latest version of their Software Development Kit (SDK) and developers everywhere are coding away, looking to build the next great iPhone application.

But in classic Apple style (i.e. heavy DRM within iTunes), Apple remains the gatekeeper. Applications can only be distributed via their App Store, and will only be distributed if approved by Apple. Apple will explain that this is for security and quality-assurance reasons, but it still puts them in control of what's available, with the ability to shut an app off if they so desire. So yes, you can be as creative as you want on their platform, but it's up to Apple if anyone is going to see it at all, or in perpetuity.

There's a similar situation going on with Google's new App Engine (the preview version was launched on 4/8, then taken down on 4/9). Google's vision is that instead of freely building apps with their API, you can develop applications using their APIs and host them on their servers, free of charge. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Salesforce's Appexchange are also providing similar opportunities for developers. Sounds great, right? But there's a catch, as ArsTechnica reports.

Perhaps the most blatant downside is being locked into Google's platform. Existing projects will have to be ported or written from scratch, and those that rely on traditional relational databases will probably have difficulty making the transition. Even more difficult would be transitioning your application to your own servers if you choose to leave Google's tender embrace. Once you've created an established application on top of Google's authentication service and stored all your data within the company's datastore, removing all this code and data and moving it to another location would appear to a be fairly onerous task.

Once again, applications -- and even more importantly, data -- are locked into someone else's platform. And this is precisely what Jonathan Zittrain is talking about.

This is a disturbing trend and runs afoul of what led to the creativity that yielded many of the most popular websites of the last few years. Imagine if Warhol was free to create any art he wanted, but someone else owned the canvases and could destroy or bury them at any point if his art offended someone? That's what's going on here.

It doesn't seem that this is a trend that will let up anytime soon as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon have way too much to gain by housing and hosting application engines. Doesn't feel like 'do no evil' anymore does it? And a little more 'PC' than 'Mac', if you ask me.

Food for thought...

South Park on Distributing and Making Money Through Online Video.

Nothing is important until it gets the South Park treatment.

South Park knows this all too well after billions of un-monetized views of their content online. Recently, that changed with the launch of the new SouthParkStudios.com, home of shareable, linkable, and most importantly, embeddable South Park content. What's also on display -- but not embeddable -- includes full episodes.

One of the best things about the site though, is the intelligence behind making individual clips of the episodes available. That's often what people want to share. They may consume full episodes on their own time, but they want to share only portions of it with others.

Here's an example, featuring many of your favorite 'viral video' stars:

And here's the FULL EPISODE.

Trey & Matt (and of course, the brilliant minds at Comedy Central [full disclosure: clients, but we were not involved with this initiative]) built a destination that didn't just give them a reason to sue YouTube, but a way to do it better than YouTube, and custom-built for their content. And in a way that allows them to make money showing the highest-quality content, immediately after airing on TV. Consumers will get used to going there first for the content.

That doesn't weaken YouTube, but it goes to show you that it's a phenomenon that's not impossible to recreate yourself if you're the rights-holder on great content. The easy part is the technology. The tough part is doing enough to make your site a better centralized distribution point and user experience then the alternatives.

There's not many doing it as well as SouthParkStudios.com. Take note.

Recognizing Memeoganda.

The onset of digital media has enabled communication, information, and news to flow quicker than ever before. The sheer velocity of information has had devastating effects on the newspaper industry (at least the printed elements) and consumers have changed their behavior to adapt.

No longer do we have to wait until the 11pm local newscast to find out what happened in our city. We don't even have to respect the anchorperson's request to stay tuned until after the commercial break to hear about a news story. We can just go to any number of websites to get that news before that brief break is over.

When an online news source breaks some piece of information (with our without fact-checking), blogs swoop in to comment, and news aggregator (i.e. Digg) users vote stories up, and they become 'the news'. And the more news becomes endorsed by the people reading it, the more 'true' it feels. Fact-checked or not.

I recently saw a panel at SXSW on the online behavior of teens and tweens, and when a few of the teenaged panelists mentioned that they got their news from Digg, it made me shudder. As great of a tool as Digg is for finding interesting pieces of online content, it's not a news source. Just an 'interesting content' recommendation engine.

But even journalists and professional bloggers use recommendation engines. They're out there; techmeme is an example. And sometimes those recommendation engines are other journalists and bloggers. In this new era of online journalism, these recommendations have become known as 'memes'. Wikipedia defines a 'meme' as consisting of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.

While memes often reflect important topics, they also have the potential to create stagnant monologues that doesn't necessarily get us anywhere -- eventually just turning what should be solution-deriving conversations, into noise. That's when memes make the leap from becoming units of cultural information and legitimate conversation to being momentum-generated waves of propaganda. Or, as I will business cliche-ify, memeoganda.

What used to be called 'trend pieces' are now being ripped from the headlines of blogs and even other publications. The biggest culprits tend to be traditional (especially print) media, and overzealous bloggers (in fact, I randomly stumbled upon this post by Mark Evans on the topic of blog topics via Techmeme) looking to capitalize on popular conversations/memes.

When journalists in traditional publications stop having original things to say, or just have the same ruminations on existing problems without offering up solutions, we get classic memeoganda. Lately, I've seen examples of memoganda regarding the ad industry ranging from the 'death of ad networks' to 'facebook's demise' to 'google click volume' to 'the death of the music industry' to even the state of the economy/recession.

These trend pieces get written so quickly and so close to each other, that while they may raise awareness of important topics, they water down the depth of the coverage, and result in a stream of 'also-ran' stories.

I started writing this blog post last night, and right on cue, this morning Techcrunch tells us about a new startup called Publish2 that will make memoganda even easier by providing journalists and newsrooms with their own Digg-like resource for finding out what's hot.

You know, maybe it's just me, but I yearn for the days when journalists broke hot stories rather than write about stories that are already hot. Memeoganda is sucking the life out of investigative journalism and seems to be more about finding new and exciting ways to conjure up ad inventory than to publish content with depth and meaning. And while stories that yield more ad inventory (read: linkbaiting) can be good bottom-line revenue band-aid, they are not the solution to mainstream journalism's woes.

The long-term answer is to strive to be the best at what you do. Break the news that matters. Investigate the broken news deeper. Don't fall prey to the easiness of spreading memeoganda.